40

You wake up cold and aching again. This morning, Zhu is up before you. He holds out a cup of coffee he made on his gas stove, and you sit up and take it from him.

Zhu's expression is serious. "This has been hard. Harder than I imagined. But we are past the halfway point in the pass now. And this storm cannot continue indefinitely. I am hopeful we are through the worst of it. Persevere, Dr. Spillane. And thank you for your determination thus far."

The two of you dismantle the tent, break camp, and set off once again into the endless storm.

As the hours pass, you realize you are no longer even cold. At first, you just feel dead. Then you start to feel hot, in your extremities initially but spreading fast. You know enough about frostbite to grasp that this is a very worrying sign.

It is Zhu who shows the first outward marks of distress. As you strain to push on during a sharp uphill stretch, he stumbles, then falls and lies facedown on the snow in front of you. He does not seem inclined to get up.

You try to struggle over to Zhu, but then you, too, are stumbling, and you, too, are on your face in the snow, and all the exertion and the pain and the cold and the numbness overwhelm you. Your eyes close, and you feel that you will never want to open them again.

And as blackness consumes your consciousness, you find you don't even care.

Next

You were always inclined toward skepticism, so it is something of a surprise, when your consciousness returns, to find that you are in heaven.

This must be heaven, surely. You can feel solid dry ground beneath you, not snow; the wind is not whipping at you, and the endless deluge of snowflakes is not soaking your clothes. You feel the warmth of a strong fire nearby. Heaven is truly more heavenly than you ever would have imagined.

Then you open your eyes, sit up, and reconsider. This doesn't look much like heaven. Instead of the expected choirs of angels, you see silhouettes of armed fighters standing against a blazing campfire. You're in a large cave chamber rather than a celestial realm in the clouds, and the long racks of miscellaneous firearms around the chamber walls, which are stocked mostly with antiquated Russian Arisakas and British Enfields, seem somewhat redundant in a world of perpetual peace and tranquility.

Most pressingly of all, if this were heaven, you wouldn't be locked in a small steel cage by the cave wall. And you certainly wouldn't expect to see Jian Zhu in the cage with you, sitting cross-legged on the floor and looking out anxiously at the fighters by the fire.

"Who are these people?"

"Tibetan separatists," snarls Zhu. "Enemies of my people and of all decent humanity. This is bad, Dr. Spillane. We're in real trouble."

There's a cold fury on his face which chills you to your bones.

"I know this particular cell," he continues. "And we're in serious trouble. These people have lived like animals for years, and they're turning into animals. Savages. Their leader, Dolkar Choden, has some history with me. She has a powerful desire to see me dead. And as far as she is concerned, you are my ally and friend. We are neither of us safe here. We'd have been safer left out on the mountain."

You sit back against the steel bars of your cage and reflect. What do you make of your situation?

Your reflections are interrupted by approaching footsteps. One of the Tibetan separatists, swathed in a thick cashmere coat, approaches the cage. He is clutching two tin bowls in his hand with spoons sticking out of them. Crouching down, he slides the bowls through the bars into the cage. "Eat," he says. "It's porridge." He turns his face to Zhu and glowers, but his words are still addressed to you. "Unlike some, we treat our prisoners humanely."

"Savages indeed," you mutter as the man walks away.

Zhu stares straight ahead, face free of emotion. "Doubt my words if you want. But I will not be eating that porridge. I suggest you don't either."

The food looks tempting and smells heavenly, but there's no way you can risk eating it. Zhu knows these people and you don't. If he does not trust their intentions, neither should you.

Stomach grumbling, you push the bowl out through the bars and sit back.

Time passes. After about thirty minutes, the man who brought you your porridge returns, this time with two companions: a man and a woman, both clutching rifles.

"You, American." The man points at you. "Our leader, Dolkar Choden, would speak with you. Come with me." He unlocks the cell; one of his companions keeps their rifle trained carefully on Zhu while the other covers you.

Once you are out, the cage door is slammed and locked again. You are marched across the cavern and through a small natural archway that leads to a side chamber. Inside is a middle-aged woman, her face coarsened by grief, hardship, and the elements. She is sitting at a cheap wooden desk, scribbling something on a sheet of paper by lantern light.

She looks up as you enter. "Sit."

Aware of the two rifles trained on you from behind, you take a seat opposite her in a rickety wooden chair and face her down.

Dolkar Choden is a stocky, handsome woman with a commanding, lined face, gray hair, thick eyebrows, and piercing brown eyes. She looks tough, competent, no-nonsense, and stern. Not a flicker of warmth plays across her face as she addresses you.

"Identify yourself, prisoner."

"I'm Dr. Namen Oberhelm Spillane of the Department of Archaeology at Tulane University."

Cooperative," Dolkar says. "That's smart. I hope you will persist with that attitude. Now answer me this. What exactly is an American academic doing in the Himalayas, in the company of a notorious enemy of the Tibetan people?"

He hired me as an archaeologist. I don't know anything about him."

Ignorance is no defense when it comes to assisting a war criminal," Dolkar says. "If that is true, you should have been more diligent when it came to investigating your partner. And now, here you are."

She leans forward, elbows resting on the desk. "Now, to the core of the matter. What did he want you to help him with up here? What is Zhu up to?"

"He's looking for a magic stone in a cave in the pass."

She looks unimpressed. "You expect me to believe this fanciful nonsense? He would risk his and your necks in pursuit of some stupid piece of folklore? Tell the truth, Spillane. He was looking for us, wasn't he?"

You do not respond.

She shrugs. "Fine. Stick to your ludicrous story. The truth will come out at trial. Now, you must have questions yourself. What would you ask me?"

Move on.

You fall silent, as does Dolkar, for a few seconds. Then she eyes you quizzically and speaks again.

"I wonder, Dr. Spillane. Do you really know your companion? Do you really know what Jian Zhu is?"

"If you're about to tell me he's a dick, I already figured that out."

He is a monster, Dr. Spillane," Dolkar says. She leans back in her chair, closes her eyes for a few seconds, and begins.

"Perhaps if I told you my story you would understand. I used to live in a village, in the foothills. I lived with my love, Karlha. I was a weaver, she was the village schoolteacher. A schoolteacher, note, not a soldier, not a spy, not a politician.

"One day Jian Zhu came to our village with questions about a local separatist militia hiding in the hills nearby. Nobody spoke to him, so he left and came back the following day with soldiers. He wanted to make an example of our village, show the others thereabouts what happens to those who do not cooperate. He—he killed them. All of them. I hid, in a secret place below our house, but Karlha was at the school. He had her murdered, her and all the children she was teaching."

Dolkar's voice is beginning to break. She stops speaking for a few seconds to get control of herself.

"And that story, my story, Karlha's story, is just one. One of hundreds such stories. And what do all these stories have in common? Jian Zhu. That is your friend, Dr. Spillane. That is your trusted partner."

"That's terrible. I am sorry for your loss."

Don't pity me, Spillane. I don't pity myself. I feel only hatred, a hatred so large it leaves no room for any other emotion. It makes me the fighter I am."

Dolkar looks up at one of the guards behind you and barks an order in Tibetan. You find yourself hauled to your feet, dragged back to the cage, and thrown in with Zhu. The cage door slams closed behind your back.